NTD R&D Funding

Are neglected tropical diseases funded in proportion to their global health burden?

These charts compare total global R&D funding against disease burden for 15 neglected tropical diseases. The bar chart ranks diseases by how much R&D funding they receive per disability-adjusted life year (DALY), directly revealing which diseases are underfunded relative to their burden. The scatterplot below shows the relationship between total burden and total funding.

R&D funding data comes from G-FINDER, a project of Policy Cures Research that has tracked global funding for neglected disease R&D annually since 2007. G-FINDER surveys over 200 funding organizations — governments, philanthropies, pharmaceutical companies, and multilateral agencies — to produce the most comprehensive picture of who funds what in neglected disease research. The figures shown here are from the 2022 funding year, covering product development for drugs, vaccines, diagnostics, and vector control across approximately 30 neglected diseases.

Disease burden (DALYs) comes from the WHO Global Health Estimates (2019 revision). One DALY represents one lost year of healthy life — either through premature death or living with disability. DALYs capture the full health impact of a disease in a single number, making it possible to compare conditions as different as malaria (55.4 million DALYs) and leprosy (40,000 DALYs) on the same scale.

GDP per capita (used in the underlying dataset) is drawn from the World Bank Open Data platform (indicator NY.GDP.PCAP.CD, 2022 current USD). The dataset covers 32 funder countries, from low-income nations like Ethiopia and Uganda to high-income countries like Switzerland and Luxembourg.